1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to communication and transportation systems, specifically to a system for informing the users of surface transportation facilities when the next vehicle will arrive at their boarding site.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
This invention is designed to help people use surface transportation facilities, particularly those that offer only infrequent service and that are unable, for reasons inherent to the nature of the system, to adhere closely to fixed time schedules. Facilities with these deficiencies can be a burden to use for anyone who must rely on them as their sole or primary means of transportation.
A prime example is the school bus transportation system. In most locations it provides only one pickup in the morning and only one dropoff in the afternoon. With only one opportunity for a ride available, the student must make special efforts to avoid missing the bus. These efforts are exacerbated when the bus deviates significantly from its nominal time schedule. In the case of school busses, large fluctuations in the arrival time are not uncommon due in part to the special situations with which the drivers must contend. These include delays loading students, especially young ones; waiting for students that are late arriving at the stop; stops to deal with discipline or emergency problems on the bus; mechanical malfunctions; etc. Add to these the normal delays to be expected from traffic congestion, train crossings, weather, etc. and it is not surprising that variations of one-half hour in the arrival time of the bus at any given loading point are not uncommon.
Dealing with these two shortcomings, namely the single pickup and the fluctuating schedule, poses a difficult problem because attempts to minimize the adverse effects of the one shortcoming maximize the penalty imposed by the other. For example, if the student attempts to minimize the risk of missing the bus by arriving at the loading site at the earliest time that the bus is likely to arrive, over the long run he or she maximizes not only the idle waiting time, but also the exposure to harsh weather and exposure to potentially dangerous motor vehicle traffic at the bus stop. This problem plagues the user of any transportation system that provides infrequent service on an erratic schedule.
According to School Transportation News (1997, www.stnonline.com), school transportation provides approximately 10 billion student rides annually, making it the largest public transportation system in the United States. In view of this, it is surprising that there is no prior art addressing the problems just cited.
Within the last few years several patents have been issued for systems that advise transit users of vehicle arrival times. These include Schmier et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,006,159), Burgener (U.S. Pat. No. 5,736,940), and Lewiner et al (U.S. Pat. No. 5,493,295). However, none of these is well suited for application to the school bus transportation system because each requires that the locations of all stops be predetermined and that each stop have a name or identifying number. School bus stops are generally not prespecified and they do not have names or numbers. A stop can be any point where a driveway meets a highway and new stops can be created and old ones abandoned from one day to the next as the need changes. The system disclosed herein allows the user to designate a stop simply by pressing a button on a user device at any time that the transport vehicle is actually stopped at the desired location. The arrival time displayed by the user device is the arrival time for that site until the button is pressed to designate a different boarding location. Another deficiency of the prior art inventions cited above is that each requires an elaborate data base of route information, stop locations and names, travel times between stops, and the like. Collecting all this information and keeping it updated in the system would require a full-time staff. The system disclosed here requires no information that the system cannot gather itself and thus it is capable of operating without human intervention. This feature makes it much more economical to deploy and maintain than any system now available.